“Was not their mistake once more bred of the life of slavery that they had been living?—a life which was always looking upon everything, except mankind, animate and inanimate—‘nature,’ as people used to call it—as one thing, and mankind as another, it was natural to people thinking in this way, that they should try to make ‘nature’ their slave, since they thought ‘nature’ was something outside them” — William Morris


Wednesday, November 24, 2010

Marina Zurkow's video art

She's a terrific video artist and I'm watching her Mesocosm right now. It's 144 hours of black and white animation rather like illustrations to a Nature book for kids but with strange, beautiful, disturbing overtones. The imagery takes place in an obelisk-like slice of space surrounded by black blankness through which a human figure walks (when he's not hanging out in the outside-world-inside-obelisk).

And it's punctuated by acousmatic sound, sometimes like birdsong, always electronic.

I've had it running on my machine for days and it's been blowing me away. In this setup you watch it frontally and in various states of Benjaminian Zersteuung, which is intriguing. It sort of happens alongside you.

Mesocosm is an intense, alluring piece. More soon including a link.




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